Felix Dahlke on programming and games

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Back to game development

After busying myself with other things for a couple of months, I feel a strong urge to return to game development. I haven’t blogged about this, but my wife and I work on a few games in our spare time. The one that’s most likely to ship this year is a puzzle game for Android, and I’m determined to make that happen.

I’ve been a little less motivated to work on that particular game because, well, it’s a puzzle game. The code is pretty much final, but most of the game content is missing; there are only a few boring levels with ugly programmer art at this point. Designing levels for a puzzle game on pen and paper doesn’t really work for me, so I began to write a level editor. A major feature will be the possibility to create random levels, so that I will hopefully be able to generate a level, attempt to solve it and rate its difficulty.

I really enjoy Android development, but one of the things that keeps annoying me is that you’re stuck with Java. I love Java as a platform, but I never felt much love for the Java language, far too limited for my taste. Fortunately, I can use Clojure for the level editor. It is possible to write Android apps in Clojure and other JVM languages, but there is apparently a performance penalty involved, and I can’t have that. I guess I’ll use C++ for our next Android game, despite the fact that I won’t be able to use the pretty neat Android framework.

I’ve seen some examples of Scala on Android and it does seem to work better than Clojure on Android. However, I’m not familiar with Scala yet, and rewriting this project in a language i don’t know would be nothing but Yak shaving Maybe I’ll try Scala in a future Android app, but I think C++ is the best bet for me. That way I could even easily port apps to iOS etc.